Ithaca is offering a great way to celebrate spring this weekend and promote biking and walking – Bike Walk Tompkins, a great cycling advocacy organization in Ithaca, will hold its 14th Streets Alive! street festival from 1 to 5 p.m. on Sunday, April 28.
I recommend it to all Twin Tiers residents because it’s fun and a great way to celebrate “active transportation” such as biking, walking, skateboarding, inline skating, dancing, and running.
Cayuga Street will be closed to vehicles from Ithaca High School to Court Street, and Court Street will be closed to vehicles to the Greater Ithaca Activities Center and open to people so they can have fun many different ways.
Several thousand people usually show up to have some outdoor fun. The forecast is for highs in the 60s with a 30 percent chance of rain.
Volunteers are still needed. Volunteer here.
The streets are busy with activities. Organizers said people will be playing Frisbee, basketball, and street hockey. For the kids, they will be Hula Hooping, playing hopscotch, and jumping rope. (This may appeal to some of us adults, too.)
In addition to promoting outdoor exercise and fun, Bike Walk Tompkins Executive Director Victoria “Vikki” Armstrong said the event helps bring people together.
“People come out and they’re like, ‘Oh, I can hang out and meet my neighbors,” Vikki told The Ithaca Voice. “People are always just sort of in conversation.”
Vikki said Bike Walk Tompkins was started as a result of the first Streets Alive! in 2012.
“Over time, there was a group of engaged professionals who really wanted it to become a more positive community building approach to using bikes as a form of transportation,” Victoria told the newspaper. “There was also this desire to make up an organization or entity that would focus solely as a nonprofit – be a voice for making bicycling and walking seen as real forms of transportation and accommodating that.”
The event will also include a bike mechanic working curbside, food trucks at Thompson Park, the Youth Bureau bike rodeo, Circus Culture at Ithaca High School, and Cultura’s Cinco de Mayo Festival at the Greater Ithaca Activities Center.
“It’s light, it’s fun, but it’s also remarkable to see how much space in our community is devoted to travel and primarily motorized travel, which is necessary, but it helps us rethink how we’ve chosen to use this space and could we choose differently,” Vikki said.
If you miss Sunday’s event but wanted to attend, the festival takes place twice a year — in the Fall Creek neighborhood in the spring and in Ithaca’s Southside neighborhood in the fall.
Thanks for reading,
Jim